by Nathan Stout (of AccordingToWhim.com)
Episode 4: Vagabond ————————————————-
Air Date: July 2005
Production Start Date: February 2004
Production End Date: April 2005
Revisions?: None.
Sketch 1: “Dino Intro” The dinosaurs put on a little show.
Sketch 2: “According To Whim: The Reality Show Commercial”
Sketch 3: “Fun With Smoke: Diet Sorceress” Nathan takes extreme measures to loose weight.
Sketch 4: “According To Whim: The Reality Show 1”
Sketch 5: “Fun With Smoke: No Fireworks In The House” Says it all.
Sketch 6: “According To Whim: The Reality Show 2”
Sketch 7: “News 1” Greenly Meadows reads the news of the day (Windows media)
Sketch 8: “According To Whim: The Reality Show 3”
Sketch 9: “News 2” Greenly Meadows reads the news of the day (Windows media)
Sketch 10: “The Entertainment Report” Lewis Cannon gives us the news (Windows media).
Sketch 11: “According To Whim: The Reality Show 4”
Sketch 12: “The Entertainment Report” Lewis Cannon gives us more entertainment news(Windows media).
Sketch 13: “According To Whim: The Reality Show 5”
Sketch 14: “According To Whim: The Reality Show 6”
Sketch 15: “Subtle Sketch: Long Table Discussion” Chris and Nathan throws subtle jokes at the audience.
Sketch 16: “Subtle Sketch: Deliverer” Chris tries to deliver something important but is stopped by a jerk.
Sketch 17: “Subtle Sketch: T.C.J.C. Pillow Talk” Chris and Nathan figure out why TCJC became TCC.
Sketch 18: “Subtlety” Chris and Nathan do some audience brain melting.
Sketch 19: “The Ultra Inflatable Ultra Bed 9000” Nathan buys a wonderful new product.
Nathan’s Notes:
1.) When Chris and myself had our business we purchased some of these plastic dinosaur grabber things where there is a dino head on a stick and you pull on this trigger thing and the mouth closes. Well, lacking for material we decide to film them. I set up a bluescreen (the best application to date of it, you really can’t tell) and we went about filming ourselves being silly. I sifted through the footage for the least crappiest stuff.
2.) “According To Whim: The Reality Show” was a stab at reality TV, something I hope dies a quick and painful death. This first in a series of sketches is a commercial where I had some fun with Photoshop and screen captures of other parts of the series. This is to set up the hype that this show is gonna rock hard!
3.) The “Fun With Smoke: Diet Sorceress” sketch fulfilled my need for a some sketches involving my smoke machine. My Niece was in town for a few weeks so I decided to force here to be on the show. No, not really. She was dying to be a ‘star’. She’ll regret that when the freaky old-man emails start coming in. Anyway in order to get the smoke to come out of the didgeridoo I had a length of swimming pool vacuum hose and simply held one end of the hose to the fog machine and the other on the end of the didgeridoo. Actually you can plainly see me crouched down holding the end of the tube if you look to the left of Sayra.
4.) I won’t say much for the other According To Whim: The Reality Show sketches because they are all like this one (with a minor exception of the last one). All of these sketches has Chris and myself watching TV. the joke being that this is a true reality show and not peppered with contrived tasks or fake stuff.
5.) “Fun With Smoke: No Fire Works In The House” gets the most questions asked because of that damn firecracker. I light this fire cracker in my bedroom and it blows up and there is this cheesy sound effect of a firework rocket and explosion that I overlay for the sound. I recorded them from my Yamaha keyboard. Well the firework gag went like this. I put a bowl of water infont of me, had Sayra hold the camera over my shoulder and I lit the real firework. Did I mention it was a damaged firework? I broke a blackcat in half and pulled out the real fuse and put in a much larger fuse from a smokebomb (it looks better when its lit). So I am actually holding 2 halves of a firecracker when I light it. Just before it burns down and catches what’s left of the gunpowder and burns my fingers I dropped it in the bowl. Simple. I then shot smoke under the door of the room and filed the house with smoke.
6.) The “Greenly Meadows Reads The News” was shot with all the mayoral stuff from Episode 2. This was actually the original intent of the Greenly/Lewis sketches. I read off these cheesy news stories that Chris wrote. We discovered that this new anchor stuff is an easy way to fill in time. It’s easy to shoot and write.
7.) In the sketches were Lewis Cannon reads the entertainment report we simply swapped jobs. I (tried) to write and Chris did the acting. His jerky movements are a riot.
8.) “The Subtle Sketches” were an idea I came up with after a few of the sketches we came up with had jokes too obscure to be really funny. So, if it ain’t that funny, it’s here. The first of these is the “Long Table Discussion.” This bit was shot in the ‘abandoned’ location in this boardroom. We wrote the lines out on paper and pretty much read straight from them. You can kinda see the writing on my papers since I wrote them with a big marker. Chris does do some fairly funny improv.
9.) “Deliverer” is a weird sketch that is really subtle in humor… I mean REALLY subtle. This was a silent sketch so I needed some music to fill in the sketch so I went to some red book audio from a Japanese game I had several years back. What you hear (in music and Japanese dialogue) is the soundtrack to cut scenes from Dragon Ball Z: Legends. O.K. here is the joke for all of you who can’t figure this out: Our delivery boy comes into this building and is heading to the executive suite with important papers. When he gets to the top he is stopped by a security guard. He points tot he sign “Mini Executive Suite” and then pointes to the stairs. The stair are smaller than the rest of the stairs in the stairwell. You see, “mini” executive suite and “small” stairs? Oh geez.
10.) “T.C.J.C. Pillow Talk” is a pillow fight between Chris and myself while we discuss why they changed the name of TCJC to TCC. If you listen to what is said you will notice that most of the stuff we say starts with T C C. It’s actually a pretty nice sketch idea. I suppose if we ever get ‘big time’ this concept should be re-envisioned. As the sketch ends we start getting muted by the F.C.C. and result to using cards with dialogue on them. Yes we do infact say all those nasty thing but you just can’t hear us.
11.) “Subtlety” has this disclaimer at the beginning whereas we (the producers of According To Whim) take no responsibility for brain aneurisms as a result of watching this sketch. You can figure out right away (from the lack of fart jokes or other visual tripserkery that this is a Chris sketch. There is dialogue… and more dialogue… and more dialogue. This has to be the biggest ‘talkie’ sketch we have done to date. All in all, after it is said is done the joke is so obscure that no one except about 4 people will get the closing joke. That’s it… 4 people. It is a reference to a sketch that Chris did in Sniffles(Sniff!). You may notice that the background (while we are in the truck) changes a little too drastically from shot to shot. We weren’t really looking for continuity… oh well. We shot part of this at a local Jack in the Box in Cleburne. If you watch the guy in the background as I come and sit down, in the next shot he is gone. I think he figured out what was going on and hot footed it out.
12.) “The Ultra Inflatable Ultra Bed 9000” has been called my definitive sketch triumph. It is one of those sketches that turns out to be like 3 times longer than you intend. This sketch is about crappy products and irritating customer help lines. My mom owned one of these inflatable beds and it had a hole in it. We had to shoot kinda fast or the bed would actually start deflating on screen. For the scene where Chris pops the bed by accident I added all the sound effects from the pop to the raspberry sound of escaping air. We simply pulled the plug and I rolled around on it while it deflated. The scene where we shot up at Chris and his hair is flying back with the force of the escaping air is actually me using a lawn leaf blower on Chris. For the next bit of the sketch I pre record some Indian sounding dialogue and then shoot myself reacting to it. Through the use of nonsensical footage of fish swimming and cats kicking themselves I get the point across that I have been on hold FOR EVER. The final shot of the sketch is Chris jumping on my new replacement and the audience see the footage slow down and fade out then you hear the pop.